crack...crack-crack...

The group of three was about 1-1/2" low and 1-1/2" to the right at 20 yards. It was the first time I had pulled that trigger in over 35 years. The pull was a bit heavier and the muzzle blast was louder than I remembered, but the feel was really nice. My Nylon 66 was functional again.

I had given it to my brother the year after I married. And I had missed it many times in the intervening years. It had been substituted for by a CIL single-shot (that put many a spruce grouse in the pot in Beauval, and turned many a gopher into hawk-food in Nisku) that I left with Nathan when we returned to the US in 1986. But it had never been forgotten.

It was my first gun. I had never had a BB gun of my own. I was 17; the year was 1965, and I had discovered that if you could get a postal mail order check, you could send away for stuff in catalogues. The year before I had almost bought a nice little Cooey -- almost identical to the CIL I bought years later in Meadow Lake -- while shopping in Amherstburg, but Cousin Jerry warned me that I would not get it across the border.

The Nylon 66 was offered for $49.95 in the J. C. Penney catalog. I had seen the ads in Outdoor Life and Field & Stream; the pictures of the piles of over 100,000 wooden blocks that had been thrown into the air and hit without a miss or misfire were impressive. They also offered a Nylon 76 (lever-action) for ten dollars more, but I had my heart set on the Nylon 66. For an additional $4.99, Penney's threw in a 4 X 20 Tasco scope. I sent away for the package.

Granny (she wasn't called that in those days, kiddies) was not thrilled. I came home from school one day and she announced that the mailman had brought a package. (The US Post Office was once a full-service organization, delivering guns, baby chickens, and bees, but that was in the days when the US was a free country.)

I was thrilled. I took the Nylon 66 to show Andy Wineberg, we made sure it was properly sighted in, and the rifle became my constant companion on my hikes. I carried it openly, down the road, over the fields, through the woods -- everywhere. Don't try that today, kiddies, because some Nervous Nellie will call the police, you will be arrested for inciting panic, and you may join the list of domestic terrorists. Remember, this was all in the days when the US was still a free country.

The Nylon 66 had an incredible rate of fire. The 14 shot magazine could be emptied in 3-4 seconds (depending on how fast your finger was) and I was once accused of having a machine gun. There was some question (a very pertinent question) with regard to the virtue of throwing that much lead downrange so quickly, since it is almost impossible to keep a semi-auto on target in rapid fire; the twitch of the finger always throws the piece to the side a bit. We did it a couple of times just for the thrill of it, but for the most part, in practice, the rifle functioned as an auto-loading single shot. In fact, the only way to achieve semi-auto functioning was to use .22 LR cartridges (some people looked down on the 66, because there were other .22 semi-autos that would function with Longs or Shorts). I typically loaded with Longs and used the gun as a single-shot. LRs were reserved for groundhogs, and the rest of the time we were generally just plinking.

When John moved to California, he was cleaning out his barn, and the Nylon 66 was in the junk pile. When I asked him about it, he said it was broken, and that if I wanted it back, I could have it. When I got it home, Jesse and I tore it down, and, sure enough, the firing pin had been snapped.

I was going to machine a new firing pin, but doing so without a Federal Firearms License is a felony, so I ordered one instead. It came last week. The firing pin of the Nylon 66 is a flat steel stamping that slides in a groove in the bolt. It is restrained by a small crosspin through a slot. The pin had been broken at the slot. There is no side pressure on the pin, and riding in the bolt as it does, there is little reason for the pin to break. Further examination showed that attempts (unsuccessful ones, thankfully) had been made to alter the rifle to fully automatic status; there were machining marks and broken plastic on the trigger itself. This may explain the harder than normal initial trigger pull now, and I will probably be ordering a new trigger for it, and a new safety. (When we were cleaning it, we tore it all the way down, and the safety had been bent. It is functional, but has stress cracks.)

Thursday night, Jesse and I completely stripped the rifle and gave it what appeared to be its first thorough cleaning since it left my hands. We scraped and polished and oiled. Everything. I also discovered the firing pin retractor spring was missing, an apparent casualty of the amateur gunsmith; I will be ordering a replacement when I order a new trigger and safety lever.

We put it back together, and the action worked smoothly. A time-tested design, the Nylon 66 has been out of production since 1989 (although a Brazilian edition, that did not use the DuPont Zytel stock material, continued to be made and was sold in the US for a while). Jesse has a Remington 552 Viper, which briefly replaced the Nylon 66 and has a very similar bolt and hammer design, but the 66 is a classic. I'm happy as a clam in a mudhole that mine is now functional again.